The proliferation of mobile computing platforms, such as laptop computers, tablets and smartphones, has led to the widespread use of software products for many diverse applications. These software products are being used by members of a mainstream population, many of whom are technically unsophisticated. To accommodate such a demographic, the user's connection to the software product is often through a simple and user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI).
While using a software product, a user may think of a change that would improve the product. Such ideas often may be insignificant and unhelpful, but occasionally a user may hit on a brilliant idea that could substantially improve the product.
Recognizing that good ideas may come from any of their users, software product developers may seek to develop ways to harvesting such ideas. One way to do so is to provide a toll-free “help” or “suggestion” telephone number the user may call, or website URL the user may visit, to ask questions or provide input.
FIG. 1 illustrates an example of such a technique for gathering ideas. This example demonstrates that multiple tools, many of which may be redundant and inconsistent with one another, come into play to process a user's idea.
A user 102 working with a software product thinks of an idea (referred to herein as a Request For Enhancement; RFE) for improving the product. The user contacts a call center 104 associated with the product vendor, either via a phone call to a phone number (provided, e.g., by the software or associated online or hardcopy documentation), or through a computer-based link (e.g., a chat session or email).
An agent at the call center 104 provides an initial vendor point of contact for the user 102. The agent at the call center 104 conveys the user's RFE information to a first support group, referred to here as Level 1 (“L1”) Support 106. A member of L1 Support documents the information from the call center agent by opening a case using the Delta Case Management tool 108.
The case is then escalated to Level 2 (“L2”) Support 110. The Level 2 Support 110 personnel use a “Salesforce” tool 112. So although access to the Delta Case Management tool 108 is still available, the Salesforce tool 112 is preferred at the L2 level.
When the case is subsequently escalated to Level 3 (“L3”) support 114, an L3 agent opens a Product Support Escalation (“PSE”) within Agile 116, a Product Quality Management (“PQM”) tool.
The L3 agent next escalates the user RFE to International Product Support (“IPS”), which uses two different tools to process the RFE. IPS opens a “Bug” 118 in the Bugzilla tool 120, and opens a Marketing Requirement Document (“MRD”) 122 in another tool 124. The term “Bug” is specific to the Bugzilla tool, and is essentially an entry or record introduced to the tool.
Finally, the Marketing and Development group evaluates 126 the RFE and considers whether or not the user-submitted idea in the RFE should be accepted. Note that at this point in the example, there are five tools in play with respect to the user's RFE: Delta Case Management 108, Salesforce 112, Agile 116, Bugzilla 120 and the MRD tool 124. As the RFE information is transferred across support group boundaries and into different management/analysis tools, there is an opportunity for the RFE data to be corrupted or lost.
Once the user submits the RFE information into this exemplary system, there may be little or no feedback to the user regarding the status of the RFE. If the user contacts the call center 104 again to ask for status, the user may be frustrated for a number of reasons. First, the call center agent may have no access to the higher layer support entities. Second, this exemplary system does not provide an ability to track or otherwise determine where the RFE is in the system, so the call center agent does not know where to look even if the agent has access to the higher layers. Further, with so many different management/analysis tools supporting the RFE, it may be difficult for the call center agent to determine exactly where to look for the most relevant and current information.